Building A Flash Game: Space Invaders

A classic arcade game that everyone remembers from the 1980s is Space Invaders. With this tutorial we are going to explore how we can make a game similar to the gameplay in Space Invaders with the Pulado Flash Game Engine. If you don’t have an account on Pulado head over there and create one. Once you have an account go into the members area and then click New Game to create a new game. Select Invasion Template as the game you would like to use as your template for this game. We’re going to call our new game “Terra Defence League” of category type Shooting with a description of “Defend Terra from attack!” and tags of “terra,earth,alien,space”. Choose a name for your game but don’t use Space Invaders because that is trademarked. Once you have that information filled out click Save and your game will be created. We’re going to show you what settings make up a game similar to Space Invaders.

Now that you have created your game you are on the game preview screen. From here you can go to the Player tab where you will be able to customize your player character (a space ship) and other things having to do with the player. You can click “select avatar” to change the avatar graphic and you can also customize how fast you want your player to move in addition to how many lives you would like the player to have. There is also an Advanced section where you can customize the scale of the graphic and the player spawn location if you want to but they are not required for this tutorial.

Below this section in the Weapon #1 section is where you can customize what projectile you would like the player to be able to shoot. You can click “select graphic” to change what the projectile looks like, you can choose the type of the projectile to change it’s behavior if you want, and you can also set a sound for the firing of it here. Lastly you can change how fast that the player can shoot (rate of fire) and how fast the projectile will move (projectile velocity) in this section. Farther down there is a Weapon #2 section where you can customize the secondary weapon which is usually a big screen clearing weapon. In the case of this game it is a giant laser beam which will kill a bunch of in the invaders. At the very bottom you can click the Save button if you have made any changes in the Player tab.

The next tab to edit is the Opponent tab. Inside the Opponent tab you can change a lot of this about the Opponent (aliens) including the graphic for the aliens, how fast they move, their movement style, and how many start at the beginning. The most important setting here is the Movement option which is set to Move Down / Back & Forth. This setting is what gives us the Space Invaders style of enemies and movement. The Starting Enemies section here governs how many rows of aliens there will be opposing you. Enemies shoot at you is also checked in the Enemy Fire item because we want the aliens to shoot at the player.

At the top of this section is a Level Difficulty slider which you can increase if you want your game to be harder than it currently is. You will notice that the opponent graphic (which is purple alien ships) is rotating between different ships. This is because on each keyframe in the opponent graphic there is a different alien ship. The Pulado game creator engine will randomly choose a ship to use every time it spawns an opponent. That setting is in the Advanced section of the Opponent area and it is called Avatar Type which is set to “Multiple per clip”.

Below this section you can customize the Weapon #1 and Weapon #2 of the aliens that oppose the player. The settings are the same as what you customized for the player. You can choose “select graphic” to change the projectile that gets fired by the aliens at the player. Additionally, you can setup a sound, the rate of fire, and the projectile velocity of the projectiles that are fired by the aliens at the player. If you have made any changes in the Opponent tab be sure to scroll down and use the Save button at the bottom.

The next section we are going to edit is the Background tab. The Background tab lets you customize the foreground and background look of your game. There are 3 layers (one above the player, one below the player, and the base background which is at the vary far back). Additionally there is a Ground layer here which is used by other game types. We only need to worry about the very far back layer for creating a game like Space Invaders so scroll down to the Background section. In this section you can click “select bottom background” to change the look the far background. You can also make the background scroll in any direction if you like. If you do change the background make sure that you use the Save button at the bottom.

The last tab that we need to look at for building a Space Invaders style flash game is the Gameplay tab. Select the Gameplay tab and open up the Environment section. In this section there is a Blocks setting and a Block Graphic setting. These two settings control the bases or defense structures that are at the bottom of a Space Invaders style game that lets you hide behind them. You can set the Block Graphic to whatever graphic you want these structures to look like and then you want to set the Blocks setting to Bottom row which will automatically build those blocks near the bottom of the screen in a row.

If you want to edit any other settings like how many hit points the player or the aliens have you can also do this in the Gameplay tab under the Player Modifier and Opponent Modifier sections.If you modify any settings in here be sure to scroll down and click Save and then you can preview your game.

That’s it! That is all there is to building a Space Invaders flash game using the Pulado engine. Now you can go back in and start tweaking other settings to make your game unique. Maybe you want the projectiles to have gravity or you want a triple shot or rapid fire powerups? Building a flash game couldn’t be easier with the Pulado flash game engine. There are also all kinds of video tutorials on this blog about the different sections of the Pulado game editor.

If you haven’t already gotten started at the beginning of this tutorial you should head over and start to make your own games with Pulado.